DEI: the great misunderstanding

On the collectivist nature of diversity, equality, and inclusion ideology.

The occupation of university campuses by terrorist supporters celebrating the October 7^th massacre of Israeli citizens and visitors to the country by Hamas and calling for more Jewish blood makes abundantly clear the extent to which our academic institutions have been damaged by the ideology of diversity, equality, and inclusion (DEI, sometimes also called EDI). Yet, against the backdrop of positive news (MIT dropping DEI statements, UNC System votes to repeal its DEI policy, UT Austin laying off multiple DEI employees, multiple universities re-instating standardized testing for admissions), there are continued calls to reform, rather than eliminate, DEI, claims that diversity, equality, and inclusion are “important values”, as well as paradoxical remarks that with proper definitions of the three terms, the ideology can be salvaged, returned to its original “good intentions”.

In my view, the problem here is that many Westerners misunderstand what DEI is, how it works, and why it is so destructive. They misunderstand it because they were born, grew up, and lived in democratic, capitalist societies that valued individual freedoms and responsibilities, while DEI at its core is a collectivist ideology. Therefore, its comprehension comes easier to those of us who experienced collectivist notions first-hand.

A good example of this misunderstanding is the term “DEI hire” that is being applied to individuals, most recently the disgraced former president of Harvard University Claudine Gay and the democratically elected Mayor of Baltimore Brandon M. Scott. The problem is that DEI does not operate at the level of individuals, but on the scale of the entire society, by modifying the selection criteria for admissions, hiring, and promotion. The term, therefore, is an oxymoron; everyone hired in academia in the past decade or so has been a DEI hire, and that is precisely why the ideology is so destructive. DEI works by replacing selection criteria that have previously been based on merit with those based on an allegiance to the ideology, propagating its destruction in the space of multitude of institutions, and in time—through generations of faculty and students. Whereas in the past, hiring and admission decisions were based on one’s ability to do the job, thirst for knowledge, and aptitude to pursue it, now they are based on one’s ability to perpetuate the ideology and its growing bureaucracies. The result is a communist dream, where those who were nothing, are becoming everything—with the associated destructive consequences.

A detour is needed here to address one of the most pervasive myths behind the need for DEI: that academia was never a meritocracy. This nonsense is being repeated ad nauseum in the hopes that repeating it will somehow make it true. One argument is that it could not possibly have been a meritocracy because the applicant pool was limited: e.g., women were not admitted to educational institutions, quotas were instituted limiting the admission of Jewish candidates, etc. Yes, imposing such limits on the applicant pool is a bad thing. Progressive societies have been doing away with these practices (unlike regressive societies, cue the Taliban). Yet, the principles that were used to select candidates from the limited pool – those principles were based on ability and aptitude and were, at their core, meritocratic, much like sex-segregated athletics or chess remain meritocratic in each sex category.

A more poignant criticism is not that academia wasn’t meritocratic, but that meritocracy itself is imperfect; that the failure of nominally meritocratic procedures resulted in the selection of the proverbial “wrong man for the job”. This, of course, is true: anyone who’s ever set foot on a university campus has no doubt encountered people of very questionable qualifications. Coupled with limited applicant pools, such failures of meritocratic selection evoke a deep sense of unfairness: why should someone incompetent be selected over someone who had no chance to compete in the first place? They shouldn’t, of course.

Meritocracy is imperfect. That is a fact. Arguing with facts is counterproductive. Admission, hiring, and promotion procedures must continuously be improved. Yet, it is imperfect in the same sense as democracy or capitalism are imperfect: there simply is no viable alternative—as long as we want things to work, that is; for the human race to continue to survive, peacefully prosper, and progress. After all, we know very well what happens to societies that exchange the imperfection of democracy and capitalism for the perfection of communism, socialism, or national socialism. Indeed, DEI has already led to some spectacularly unqualified individuals infiltrating academia—Claudine Gay is merely one example—and the storm of violent, antisemitic, pro-Hamas protests.

DEI grew out of authoritarian ideologies and is repeating their tried and tired destructive paradigms. It is based on the fallacy that a fair selection must reflect the composition of the population, on fighting “overrepresentation”—the same notions were used by the Nazis to justify their antisemitic policies in German and Austrian universities, and beyond, in 1930s; It is based on the notion that everyone must first and foremost be an activist, guarding ideological purity and promoting contemporary notions of morality and social justice—the notion adopted in the USSR, where every act and statement were imbued with political significance, one that was either in accordance the party line, or against it.

This brings me to my final point. According to Theodosius Dobzhansky, a Russian-American geneticist and evolutionary biologist who was fortunate to have escaped Lysenko’s purges by defecting to the West, “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” Neo-Marxists occupying Western universities, following in the anti-Darwinist footsteps of their forebears, criticize the “survival of the fittest” approach to admissions, hiring, and promotion. But a living system subject to a selection pressure will always evolve; the only question is, what will it be evolving towards? In other words, “survival of the fittest” is a universal law. What changes with the nature of the selection pressure is not whether the fittest survive—they always do—but what they are fit for. Those, who survive the selection based on DEI ideology, are fit for activism, cowardice of mobs, bigotry, antisemitism and other forms of racism, violence and destruction. This is exactly what we see in today’s campus protests, and this has always been the point: to produce generations of activists who not only lack knowledge, but who were robbed of the skills needed to develop it, of the curiosity to seek answers to their questions beyond the “party line”. There never were any good intentions.

(The image used in this post comes from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorkutlag).